…xpressing your love in this manner enriches both your lives. Your critical inner voice will most likely try to sabotage your loving exchanges with your partner. It will influence you to overlook a loving gesture: He never demonstrates his love for you. I don’t see any signs of it. It will belittle your partner’s loving responses: You call that loving? It’s nothing. You deserve more than that. It will make fun of you when you acknowledge something…
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…de of us that doubts and diminishes who we are. We all possess a “critical inner voice” that tells us we are unworthy or undesirable in all kinds of ways. Being with a narcissist may make us feel a little better about ourselves in some respects, because we feel good that someone with such a seemingly high opinion of themselves chose us. Our partner may also build us up, making us feel special as their significant other, because they would only be…
Learn More…Click below to get a free PDF on how to tame your inner critic. Read more articles by Dr. Lisa Firestone here Learn more about how to Overcome Your Inner Critic with this eCourse here …
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…e anti-self (made up of extremely self-hating and self-demeaning “critical inner voices”). So, for these people, even slight criticism can be a narcissistic injury, leading to an angry outburst and desperate attempts to regain their fragile, inflated self-esteem. Often, a condescending remark will help them to reestablish their superior image. Condescending is a common dynamic in narcissistic relationships. This behavior can be traced back to the…
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…l, she and her sister had had to tiptoe around him to avoid his unleashing critical verbal attacks on them. After telling her story, the woman recognized that many of her attitudes toward her son were similar to those she experienced from her father. Although she had aspired to be very different as a parent, in seeing her son as “bad” or “a problem child,” she was treating him as she had been treated. Reenacting our parents’ negative behaviors is…
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…tal cues and see ourselves through our parents’ eyes. We start to form an “inner voice” that translates the attitudes we picked up from our parents into our own self-concept. If a parent was critical of us or themselves, we take on these criticisms. If we felt like a burden, or that we were too loud, too quiet, too needy, too angry, too shy, etc., we will carry on believing these things about ourselves long after we grow up. Another way we keep ou…
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…d though I am teaching a weekend workshop on how to “Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice,” I am also looking forward to connecting with my own sense of who I am, what matters to me, and identifying those daily internal dialogues that get in my way. So why is a retreat so different from taking time at home to take on those dusty to-do lists, those pesky New Year’s resolutions, or those personal goals of spending more time with your partner or your ch…
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…toward ourselves,” said Firestone. She describes how a person’s “critical inner voice” can flood his or her mind with harmful suspicions and accusations that fuel feelings of jealousy. She frequently finds that what people are telling themselves about what’s going on with their partner is often a lot worse than what is actually going on. For example, a person may think, “She is totally checking out that guy. She’s losing interest in me. She’s goi…
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…ticism One of the biggest obstacles to thinking positively is the Critical Inner Voice. We all have an inner critic that loves nothing more than criticizing our every move. This inner critic can lead us into a spiral of shame or self-hatred. Ruminating on negative thoughts about ourselves, or others, only strengthens the neural pathways for negative thinking. In order to retrain our brains to think positively, we must stand up to our inner critics…
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…in Ways We Were Treated In the same way that we may provoke our partner to voice our self-critical thoughts, we may also act in ways that provoke a certain reaction that we’ve come to expect based on our history. For example, if we grew up in a house where people blew up and got into a lot of loud arguments, we may start yelling at our partner when we feel frustrated. When our partner yells back, however, we may feel triggered and terrible, becaus…
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